Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature

Steven Pinker says humanity is improving.

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One of the signal pleasures of a nostalgic soap opera like AMC’s Mad Men-—or, more recently, ABC’s Pan Am—is
the consistent appeal of discovering that our predecessors’ morality is
roundly inferior to our own. We watch as Betty lights a cigarette at
the dinner table, as Roger offhandedly waxes patrician, as a boor pats a
woman’s bottom, and get a little thrill from both the transgression and
our own superiority to it.

Steven Pinker’s scientized history The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
(Viking, $40) is a self-congratulatory opus of much greater dimension.
Pinker amasses an impressive array of facts and graphs showing that
worldwide per capita violence has indeed declined precipitously since
Europe’s enlightened 1700s, that racism has waned, spankings been
spanked and major wars made less frequent. Against the notion that
humanity has degenerated from nobly peaceful hunter-gatherers to
mechanized killers, he employs relentless statistical proof. We really don’t off each other like we used to.
Even the gruesomely bloody 20th century—with its 70 million dead in two
world wars—is, when those mind-boggling numbers are considered relative
to the world’s expanding population, less violent on average than the
preceding centuries.

When Pinker moves
toward explaining why this shift away from violence has happened,
however, he mostly leaves science at the doorstep. Much of the book is
taken up, in chatty tones, explaining just how awful we all used to be,
and how awful we all aren’t now. In the past, we are told, inquisitors
stretched alleged crypto-heathens on racks, Genghis’ officers cut off
ears as trophies of kills, goats of all kinds were mercilessly scaped,
men were culled and women raped as spoils of war, etc.

The
slow de-moding of such practices is, for Pinker, part of something he
terms the “civilizing process,” which he seems to see as history’s
inevitable forward path. As society has adopted Enlightenment ideals and
notions of the sanctity of the individual, and as states have
supplanted the old vengeful codes of honor with impersonal justice, we
have grown peaceful and prosperous.

This model holds up
beautifully well when only Europe is considered, but elsewhere Pinker’s
optimism seems hapless and hopelessly selective in its descriptions.
America’s idiosyncratically violent nature is left to be mostly a
mystery, while present-day Haitian necklacings, Salvadoran guerrilla
massacres and coked-up African child soldiers—essentially the byproducts
of U.S./European prosperity—go largely unmentioned. Pinker blames the
violent spike of the 1960s on the “de-civilizing” influences of a
dangerous counterculture, calls American blacks violent and “stateless,”
and attributes our current drop in violent crime largely to the
positive effects of mass incarceration.

That
said, Pinker’s heartening narrative of progress toward a more blameless
present and an even better future is a story I do hope is true.
However, I am left to suspect that as much violence is likely to result
from our pacific Enlightenment as has ever been tamped down by it, and
that the future has an unsettling habit of slipping any noose we prepare
for it.